Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Factory’s Tony Wilson, also in the audience, was equally impressed and invited ESG to make a record for him. As it happened, Wilson had some studio time available, again thanks to ACR, who’d come to New York to record their debut album, To Each…, only to finish three days ahead of schedule. With Martin Hannett producing, the session yielded the classic ESG tracks “You’re No Good,” “UFO,” and above all “Moody,” whose oxymoronic blend of cold and sultry made it a foundation track for the house music scene. Ironically, ACR’s own experience with Hannett was disastrous. “He took a lot of the funkiness out by making Donald Johnson record every part of the drum kit separately,” says guitarist Martin Moscrop. As a result, when To Each… came out it was panned, while ESG’s 99/Factory EP, released in early 1981, received rave reviews, with the girls being hailed as “a cross between Public Image and Tamla Motown.”

  ESG’s odd mixture of emaciated minimalism and raw soul, their hard-funk basslines and chittering percussion, totally fit postpunk notions of what dance music should be. Yet as McGuire recalls, ESG “were from a different planet.” An all-girl family band from the South Bronx, the Scroggins sisters were often mistaken for Puerto Rican, but were actually the children of a white father and a black mother. The latter had originally bought the girls instruments when they were very young (Deborah Scroggins started playing bass around age eight) as a ruse to stop the kids from hanging out on the streets and getting into trouble. “I always felt that ESG didn’t know what they had gotten themselves into,” McGuire says. “They were all so young playing these rock clubs and they couldn’t even drink. I remember Liquid driving down to do a show in Washington, D.C., with ESG, the girls’ mom coming along. She made sandwiches for everyone and it was like a family outing!”

  In one early interview, Renee Scroggins described the ESG sound as “punk funk,” but she wasn’t referring to Gang of Four so much as Rick James, who used that term to describe his music. In those days, ESG did have common ground with the English agit-funkers, though, in that they weren’t crazy about the slickly orchestrated black dance music of the late seventies—such as Earth, Wind and Fire’s I Am or Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall—but instead harked back to the sinewy, stripped-down funk of the first half of the decade. James Brown was a particular favorite. “It was the funkiest music I could ever hear, especially when [JB] would go to the bridge and let the funk rip,” Renee Scroggins told Tuba Frenzy. “So I felt that he would always make that little funky space too short. You know, the part that made you want to really dance and get down? I wanted to hear something like that but let that funky space ride!”

  That same desire to isolate the most invigorating section of a funk or disco record was what gave birth to hip-hop in the late ’70s. Known as “breaks,” these stripped-down, percussive parts would be extended by DJs by cutting back and forth between two copies of the same record. Break beats would become the rhythmic foundation for rap music. It was weirdly fitting, then, that ESG would themselves end up heavily sampled by rap producers, with “UFO” in particular appearing on numerous tracks, most famously the Marley Marl–produced “Ain’t No Half Steppin’” by Big Daddy Kane. Indeed, ESG were as much an organic product of the South Bronx as hip-hop. “The Bronx can give you a lot of musical feeling because there’s so much stuff going on out there,” observed Renee Scroggins. “It has a lot of savage drive, with the drumbeats and all. The whole summer long, all you hear from sunrise to sunset is congas in the park back there. It can drive you crazy.”

  Liquid Liquid was shaped by similar environmental sounds. “The Lower East Side of Manhattan was very Hispanic and you heard this Latin stuff all the time coming out of every bodega,” says McGuire. “All of our cowbell and conga sounds were coming from being exposed to that.” The group had begun as the punkier-sounding Liquid Idiot, but a Pop Group–like ritualistic element gradually filtered into the music. The band’s posters encouraged people to come to shows with things to bang on. “Some gigs got really tribal. It was mostly improv, just chaotic, broken beer bottles everywhere.” After various lineup changes, the band’s sound became steadily more percussive as they absorbed the influence of Fela Kuti, reggae, and gamelan, and they decided to change the group’s name to Liquid Liquid because it “suggested a slippery grooviness.”

  Liquid Liquid released a series of EPs on 99, but they are mostly remembered for one track, “Cavern,” which was heisted hook, (bass) line, and sinker by Grandmaster Flash for the 1983 rap hit “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It).” Released earlier that year on Liquid’s Optimo EP, “Cavern” received a substantial amount of play on New York’s black radio stations, and copies were flying out of the 99 record store. Then, suddenly, it disappeared from rotation, only to be shortly replaced by “White Lines.” McGuire remains ambivalent, feeling both exploited and honored that one of his heroes liked the band’s work so much he’d rip it off.

  Liquid Liquid’s music was also embraced by a different black scene, the mostly gay black and Hispanic dancers at clubs such as Paradise Garage. This was disco culture going underground again after its mainstream overexposure circa Saturday Night Fever. McGuire recalls performing at the Garage a few times and hand-delivering a copy of Liquid’s latest EP to the resident DJ god, Larry Levan. “The Garage was an insane place. It really was a big parking garage that was turned into a disco. When we played, they had us do three songs, then get offstage. This was typical for all these big dance places we played, like the Funhouse, or the Roxy. It was so much more about the DJ.”

  A new form of postdisco dance music was coming out of New York on labels such as West End, Prelude, and Sleeping Bag, with less emphasis on live musicianship and more use of technology—drum machines, synth bass, and production soaked with dub-style echo. As McGuire noted, the DJ ruled, not just in the booth at the club, but in the recording studio, too. Auteur figures such as Levan, Walter Gibbons, Shep Pettibone, and Francois Kevorkian became famous for their remixes and production work and, in Pettibone’s case, for extended dance mixes on New York radio that seamlessly segued multiple tracks.

  Two New York figures, Grace Jones and Arthur Russell, bridged the gap between the gay postdisco scene and the largely straight world of postpunk. Russell almost joined Talking Heads early on. His background, however, was decidedly nonrock. A gay avant-garde musician with hippie-mystic tendencies, Russell fell in love with disco at the New York club, the Gallery. Literally entranced by disco’s use of repetition, he spotted the parallels between the DJs’ endless, unbroken mixes and the minimalist compositions of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Russell cofounded the label Sleeping Bag and started recording surreal art disco tracks such as “Go Bang #5” (under the name Dinosaur L) and “In the Light of the Miracle,” often collaborating with New York’s leading DJ remixers.

  Grace Jones was a Jamaican expatriate turned fashion model turned disco diva, whose career stalled when disco fever cooled. She regained her momentum when Island Records hooked her up with legendary reggae rhythm section Sly and Robbie, and a coterie of players, writers, and engineers based around Compass Point Studios in Nassau, to create 1980’s Warm Leatherette. On the surface, the record’s midtempo dub-funk grooves and slick musicianship would seem to have little in common with postpunk, if not for the judicious choice of cover tunes: the title track by the Normal, Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” and the Pretenders’ “Private Life,” a brutally unsentimental song in which a woman cuts loose a clinging man with harsh kiss-off lines such as “Attachment? Obligation? That’s so wet!” Jones’s next album, Nightclubbing, which featured similar treatments of songs written by Iggy Pop and Sting (the title track and “Demolition Man,” respectively) alongside bewitching originals such as “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Feel Up,” and “Walking in the Rain,” was voted 1981’s album of the year by the critics at NME. Jones’s imperious voice, striking image (a mixture of Amazon, cyborg, and dominatrix), and performance-art-like One Man Show made her a signifier banquet for the semiotic
ians of the rock press and style magazines.

  At one point, the music papers excitedly reported that Grace Jones was set to work with A Certain Ratio on a cover of Talking Heads’ “Houses in Motion.” According to ACR’s Moscrop, two backing tracks were laid down by the band with Martin Hannett producing, and Jones “came down to listen to them. The plan was actually to record an entire album in the Bahamas with Grace.” The idea was ultimately quashed but serves as an apt symbol for the burgeoning love affair between Factory Records and Manhattan. After living in Tribeca for a couple of months while recording their debut album, ACR became besotted with the city. They even acquired an American vocalist, Martha Tilson, who gradually eclipsed their original singer, Simon Topping. He’d lost confidence in his vocals and instead took lessons in hand percussion, an obsession ACR developed from watching Puerto Ricans playing congas in Central Park.

  New Order likewise fell head over heels for New York, and their music gradually assimilated its various dance floor sounds, including postdisco; the brash, synthetic style known as Latin freestyle; and electro, a hip-hop subgenre heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and based around drum machines and synths. Thanks to their American tour manager Ruth Polsky, who also worked as a booker for Hurrah’s and Danceteria, New Order encountered a kind of chic but cool nightclub totally different from the tacky discotheques and rock ’n’ roll pissholes they knew in the U.K. “The other thing we used to do when in New York,” recalls New Order drummer Steven Morris, “was just listen to Kiss FM, all those Pettibone mastermixes with tracks by Sharon Redd and D-Train. Half the time we used to just stay in the hotel listening to the radio! We didn’t dance, though, didn’t dance. It takes Ecstasy to make a white man dance.”

  “When New Order originally came to New York, they were still sort of in the rock-y phase,” recalls Moscrop. Still shell-shocked by Ian Curtis’s death, the group stumbled through the second half of 1980, struggling to locate a new direction. New Order’s first single, “Ceremony,” was essentially the last Joy Division song, while the debut album, Movement, sounded stilted and unsure. Peter Hook recalls the period as a real low point for the group and for Martin Hannett. The only good thing to come out of the sessions, Hook says, was that Hannett showed the band how to operate the mixing board. “That was his fatal mistake! So when we came to do the single ‘Temptation,’ we fucked Martin off and did it ourselves.” Meanwhile, the group had been cheering itself up by listening to peppy electronic disco from Italy, and Morris had taught himself how to do drum programming.

  Morris cites 1981’s “Everything’s Gone Green,” the electro-influenced single that immediately followed Movement, as the turning point. “That was the beginning of bringing the drum machine in and pressing the start button.” After their massive 1983 hit “Blue Monday,” New Order hooked up with Arthur Baker, then the hottest dance producer in New York, to make the single “Confusion.” The video offered a fabulous snapshot of one corner of New York’s postdisco scene, the Latin freestyle kids clustered around the Funhouse club. You can even see New Order carefully observing the dance floor response to “Confusion” as resident DJ Jellybean Benitez plays reel-to-reel tapes of the work in progress. The Hacienda, a Manchester club owned and funded by Factory and New Order, “was built because of Danceteria, Funhouse, Roxy, all these fantastic clubs in New York,” says Moscrop. “New Order were thinking, ‘Why haven’t we got this in Manchester?’ Like with the ESG record, it was Factory bringing a bit of New York back to England.”

  While New Order and A Certain Ratio couldn’t get enough of the Manhattan vibe, by 1983 the native New Yorkers no longer reciprocated the feeling. Downtown’s hitherto Anglophile hipsters mounted an anti-Limey backlash. The East Village Eye started a column called “The Real American Underground,” celebrating the resurgence of groups influenced by rockabilly, blues, zydeco, and other roots music. Former No Waver Kristian Hoffman of the rockabilly-styled Swinging Madisons urged music fans to “demand more for your entertainment dollar than a bunch of tone-deaf Englishmen telling you what you ought to like,” and declared that “the future is not in style anymore.” Synths and drum machines were out, guitars were in again. Some turned to the hardcore punk scene, while the more arty types such as Sonic Youth and Swans moved to resurrect No Wave.

  Very early on, Sonic Youth showed evidence of Anglophilia and PiL damage (their early drummer Richard Edson also played with 99 Records’s resident Pigbag wannabes, Konk). But by 1983’s Confusion Is Sex, Sonic Youth raised the banner of noxious noise, waging war against sterile machine funk. Guitarist Thurston Moore had already staged the first battle cry of the resistance with his Noise Fest of June 1981 at the White Columns art gallery in SoHo. Stretched across nine evenings, the entertainment included performances by the earliest incarnation of Sonic Youth, future SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s band Avoidance Behavior, Glenn Branca, and long-running No Wave outfit Ut. “It was a watermark event because it took place at a time when the No Wave was gone and nobody knew each other,” Moore recalled in 1985. Not everyone who attended was so thrilled. For Luc Sante, “much of the Noise Fest stuff seemed arid and theoretical and unsexy. It was heavily identified with a certain strain that had to do with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and came out of the Kitchen—very arty, sort of academic, and definitely not funky.” Nonetheless, the No Wave redux of Sonic Youth and Swans represented the immediate future for New York. In the mideighties, the city’s arty bands backed away from black influences and dance floor imperatives and instead drew on an almost totally white canon of avant-garde noise makers.

  Like No Wave before it, the mutant disco moment had thrived on the back-and-forth between the rock scene and the art world. Ironically, what brought the era to a close was the explosion of the downtown art scene, which definitively eclipsed music as a career option for many of the city’s Renaissance men and women. New art galleries sprang up all over the Lower East Side, showcasing nontraditional art of all kinds, from graffiti to video art to Kenny Scharf–style kitschedelic sculptures made from found objects and consumer detritus. The most famous of the new spaces was the FUN Gallery, which opened in 1981 and gave Scharf, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, and Jean-Michel Basquiat their first solo exhibitions. Within a few years there were literally dozens more galleries dotting an area hitherto known for its burned-out lots, boarded-up stores, and heroin-copping spots.

  The precursors to the Lower East Side boom were two huge art exhibitions, 1980’s Time Square Show, and 1981’s New York/New Wave. “Time Square Show took place in an abandoned porn palace, all these graffiti artists showing together with downtown people,” recalls Richard McGuire, himself an artist as well as musician. “New York/New Wave was a big show at PS1 in Queens, a big museum-like alternative gallery space in an old school building. All sorts of downtown people were involved. David Byrne showed photos of overturned chairs. DNA played. There were Mapplethorpe photos and lots of photos of rock stars.”

  New York/New Wave turned Basquiat and Haring into stars. As Vincent Gallo, Basquiat’s erstwhile Gray bandmate put it acidly, “The minute Jean-Michel had a chance to move into the place he really wanted to be—the art world—he quit the band in a second.” The bubble of dilettantism that had insulated and protected all the polymath creativity of downtown suddenly burst. “There’d been an incredible mix of filmmakers, musicians, poets, all this crossbreeding of artistic practices, but at a certain moment people began specializing,” recalls Gary Indiana, himself a jack-of-all-arts in those days, involved in writing poetry and art criticism, directing plays, and playing music. “They began narrowing their field of interest to a specific thing they were going to make a career with. Reagan came in and everyone had to make money. You couldn’t be all over the map anymore.”

  Another factor was a contraction of the live-music circuit, partly caused by the rise of clubs oriented around DJs rather than bands. Pat Place recalls a golden period when the Bush Tetras could play two or three times a month in New York and draw crowds between
one and two thousand. “Back then, in our prime, we sometimes got paid from six to ten thousand dollars a night.” Her erstwhile boss, James Chance, also mourns the early eighties as the last time when New York “revolved around live music. Somewhere around 1984 that whole era of the mega-nightclub started up.” Rap and the electronic postdisco sounds that would eventually coalesce as “house music” were in the ascendant. Mutant disco and the arty, eclectic clubs that nurtured the style were squeezed out.

  The Mudd Club had been killed by its own success. Maas had to hire doormen to deal with both the celebrities and the “bridge and tunnel” nonhipsters who wanted to get in. “I went into it as a fantasy, never expected it to make money,” he noted glumly in a 1983 East Village Eye elegy for the Mudd. “When the Mudd did become successful, I didn’t have the restaurateur’s skills that are essential to running any kind of operation. My fantasy went out the window.”

  Downtown was changing. Gentrification made its first incursions into the Lower East Side. A pivotal moment was March 1984’s Operation Pressure Point, a massive drug bust whose targets included smack-infested Avenue B, masterminded by a thrusting young U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York named Rudolph Giuliani. Then AIDS came into the picture, claiming the lives of many artists (including Keith Haring) and some musicians, too, notably Klaus Nomi, in 1983, and Ricky Wilson of the B-52’s, in 1985.

  Surveying the era with a couple of decades’ hindsight, Ann Magnuson concedes, “If you look back at it just as a series of parties, it does seem rather frivolous. But if you see it as people who loved each other, who were sharing their life energies, it was a celebration. They just wanted to live to the max, every second. When AIDS started picking everybody off one by one, it became obvious to me that it was about life. Keith Haring’s paintings in particular really exemplify that energy—that radiant-baby image of his. This was not that Bright Lights, Big City version of New York in the eighties, stockbrokers running around doing cocaine and chasing models. This was about people who had to leave where they came from originally to come to New York, or die. Who had to create art, or die.”